Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart : A Systems Approach to Engaging Leaders with Their Challenges - Hardcover

Coaching high-powered executives requires something special, something extra. Executive coaches must be more than instructors; they must become partners whose emotional investment in business outcomes equals that of their clients. They must have the strength and courage to face an organizational leader in a time of crisis and speak the unvarnished truth. They have to be a force to be reckoned with. They have to have backbone and heart.
Mary Beth O'Neill has backbone and heart, and she's used it to help executives become better leaders and make better business decisions for more than twenty years. In this book, she shares the secrets of her success as she details the techniques she's developed over the course of her exceptional career.
O'Neill knows first-hand that executive coaching is about self-management, about learning how to be with leaders so you can seize those critical moments when they are most open to learning. She focuses on the need for coaches to build their own signature presence with clients and outlines four conditions that promote such a presence.
The author also teaches coaches how to deal with clients in terms of the "force fields" they create and react to; that is, the political and emotional climates within organizations that can ensnare both executive and coach and make for faulty decision making. In so doing, O'Neill introduces an important new systems approach to executive coaching.
O'Neill reinforces her observations on coach self-management and her systems perspective with a sound four-phase methodology for implementing both, a methodology that covers contracting, planning, live action intervening, and debriefing. She also addresses special applications such as how to guide conversations that establish coaching relationships and how a coach can help executives coach others.

MARY BETH O'NEILL is a senior consultant for LIOS Consulting Corporation at the Leadership Institute of Seattle at Bastyr University. She has successfully coached CEOs, senior executives, and other leaders for twenty years.